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About

Dan Gardner

New York Times’ Bestselling Author, Superforecasting

Journalist

Bio

Dan Gardner is an acclaimed Canadian journalist, best-selling author, and international speaker.

Trained in law (LL.B., Osgoode Hall Law School, Class of ’92) and history (M.A., York University, ’95), Dan first worked as a political staffer to a prominent politician. He delved into a writing career as a newspaper columnist and feature writer whose work won or was nominated for every major award in Canadian newspaper journalism.

In 2005, Dan attended a lecture by renowned psychologist Paul Slovic. It was a life-changing encounter. Fascinated by Slovic’s work, Dan immersed himself in the scientific literature. The result was a seminal book on risk perception, Risk: The Science and Politics of Fear, which was praised as “a cheery corrective to modern paranoia” by The Economist. Published in 11 countries and 7 languages, Risk was a bestseller in the United Kingdom and Canada. But more gratifying to Dan was the support of leading researchers, including Slovic, who praised the book’s scientific accuracy.

In his latest book, Future Babble, Dan delved deeper into psychology to explain why people continue to put so much stock in expert predictions despite the repeated — and sometimes catastrophic — failure of efforts to forecast the future. Again, Dan was delighted that his book garnered the praise of leading researchers, including Philip Tetlock of the University of California, who called it “superb scholarship,” and Steven Pinker of Harvard University, who said it should be “required reading for journalists, politicians, academics, and those who listen to them.”

In September, 2015, Gardner and co-author Philip Tetlock published Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction, which Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Zweig called “the most important book on decision-making since Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow,” and The Economist declared “a gift to anyone who has to think about what the future might bring. In other words, to everyone. Superforecasting is a New York Times and Washington Post bestseller. It was longlisted for the Financial Times/McKinsey Best Business Book of 2015 Award and will be published in 18 countries and 16 languages.

These publications have led Gardner to develop a series of lectures that expose and correct those assumptions, helping people think, decide, organize, and communicate better.

“We are the healthiest, wealthiest, and longest-lived people in history. And we are increasingly afraid. This is one of the great paradoxes of our time.”

TOPICS

The Forecast for Tomorrow: More Future Babble

The prediction business is huge. It always has been. Wise men have forever claimed special insight into the future, which they were happy to share for a fee, and people have always been willing to pay.

They still are. Is that because wise men deliver results? Hardly. Their forecasts routinely failed in the era of goats’ guts and tea leaves and they keep on failing today, in the era of pundits with PhDs. Research proves the point. So does experience: Out of 54 leading economists consulted by an American business magazine, 54 said there would be no recession in 2008. The most comprehensive experiment on expert forecasting ever conducted revealed something even more startling: The more famous an expert is, the more likely it is that his predictions will be wrong. So why do we keep taking these would-be prophets seriously? The media are partly to blame for not holding experts accountable when their predictions fail. But more fundamentally, the answer lies in psychology and the brain’s profound aversion to uncertainty: We believe because we want to believe.

But we don’t have to be suckers for soothsayers. If we understand the psychology that compels us to believe, we can learn to distinguish between reasonable forecasts and the tales of confident experts. And that can help us make good decisions that leave us better prepared for the future. No matter what happens.

Getting Risk Right

Risk is serious business. Get it right and good things happen. Get it wrong and the results will be very different — as the global meltdown of 2008 so vividly demonstrated.

Unfortunately, research shows people routinely get risk wrong. We worry about things we shouldn’t. We don’t worry about things we should. And we swing from complacency to panic, and back again. The result is one bad decision after another — with costs measured in lost dollars, health, and peace of mind.

Why does this happen? How can we do better? The author of the international acclaimed bestseller Risk delves into cognitive and social psychology to explain where our perceptions of risk come from and why they so often don’t match reality. Understanding how we form perceptions, and how they can go wrong, is the indispensable first step to making better decisions about risk.

Thinking Like a Fox

Dan Gardner is a leading expert in forecasting, due to an adept understanding of cognitive and social psychology. Philip Tetlock, a renowned psychologist at the University of California’s Haas School of Business, distinguishes between two types of thinkers — “hedgehogs” and “foxes.” Hedgehogs insist on simplicity and certainty. They see problems through a single analytical lens. And they are very confident. They know the answer. Foxes are much more comfortable with complexity and uncertainty. They’ll use lots of analytical lenses to look at problems, and ask other people what they see. They are not nearly so confident as hedgehogs. They may know the answer, but they’re never sure.

In the most comprehensive experiment of its kind, Tetlock assembled almost 300 people in the business of providing advice on politics and economics — political scientists, economists, journalists — and had them make predictions about everything from inflation rates to wars. In all, Tetlock collected an astonishing 27,450 judgments about the future.

The results were dismal. The average expert did no better at forecasting than a dart-throwing chimpanzee. But some experts were even worse — while others did significantly better than the average.

What made the difference? Not education or experience. Not profession or politics. No, what counted was whether they were foxes or hedgehogs; the foxes came out on top every time.

Styles of thinking are not innate. They can be learned. Gardner offers his own application of Tetlock’s psychological terminology, making it accessible and useful for audiences that intend to develop a sharper grasp on forecasting.